Somebody called to say that you are Lord Scroope; does that make sense?

Show me your bookshelves?

One of my very favourite cousins is starting his PhD in education. One of his long-term goals is to help improve how LGBT issues are handled in the Ontario and Canadian school systems.

We talk about this stuff, some, and we talk a lot about the broader education of a queer activist. About racism, and poverty/classism, and feminism, and sex education, and reproductive justice, and disability, and what I came up calling 'linked oppressions' and is now referred to as intersectionality ...

And then again about vulnerability and shame and addiction and trauma and how they can echo down the generations of a marginalised subculture as they do down the generations of a family, and about building community and sometimes about psychology and sociology and anthropology and history and art ...

At one point I was tossing a bunch of books and names at him and suggested that I ought to make him a bibliography, and then, on further pondering, that maybe I should crowdsource it a bit, because while in some ways he and I are different enough for me to be useful to him - I'm a woman, I'm twice his age, my activist and academic experiences and preoccupations are different - at heart we're just a couple of white semirural Protestant SW Ontario kids not that far off the farm or the railroad.

Plus, it might be useful to people other than him.

So, here's my invitation/request: if you identify as an academic—formally or otherwise—and/or as an activist, tell me (him, us) about the books and essays and writers/artists and works that changed you, informed you, showed you aspects of yourself and the world that changed you and changed how you went to work. Your touchstones, as it were.

Everything is welcome: Movies. Music. Poetry, prose, fiction, academic works, famous or obscure, any field, any era. I'm particularly interested in works outside your own usual interests that turned out to be extremely important to you.

Rules:

1) You don't need to explain why you're recommending something, but you are very welcome to. You also don't need to provide links, but they will be appreciated.

2) All works will be assumed to be both luminous and flawed, which is to say, do not challenge other commenters on their choices, or post dispargements/anti-recs. Those can be very valuable, but not here and now.

If you're reccing something that you consider problematic but still really valuable—or even valuable because it illuminates a really problematic mindset—you're welcome to say so, absolutely. Footnoting other people's recs is not so helpful here. If you know a better work on a topic, just rec it, okay? The goal here is the broadest possible net, and we won't get that if this turns into "your fave is problematic."

3) You can make as many recs as you like, or only one. Pick things that have lasted for you, things that have held up over the years, things that you're profoundly grateful not to have missed.

4) Feel free to link this, but I'd much rather it be linked to individuals or small groups who will be very interested than to larger groups who will be largely indifferent.

ETA: also, please don't reply to comments, as I'd like people to be able to come back and edit their comments (or add to them themselves if they can't edit for whatever reason), plus it makes everything easier to read.

Patrick Califia, particularly Public Sex and Sex ChangesMinne Bruce Pratt, particularly S/heLeslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues and Transgender Warriors (though the scholarship is insufficiently critical and rigorous for my taste in the latter, it was the first, and as far as I know is yet the only of such breadth breadth, account of gender variance through history and across multiple cultures.Loren Rex Cameron, Body Alchemywritings of Audre Lorde Julie of the Wolves, Jean Craighead GeorgeNobody's Family is going to Change, Louise FitzhughDorothy Allison, Bastard Out of CarolinaThe Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Simmons and Chabris and Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely for illustrating the fallibility of "obvious, common-sense" choices and conclusionsa bunch of popular articles on Adverse Childhood Experiences and complex/cumulative trauma and re/building resiliency (I'll see if I can find links for some of the better ones) and neuroplasticityStarhawk, mostly Truth or Dare and The Fifth Sacred Thingwritings by Temple Grandin, but mostly short sections not entire worksThe asynchronous development theory of giftedness, and learning and development theories generally, in overviewNickel and Dimed: on not getting by in America, Barbara EherenreichIndigo Girls' first 10 albums and Amy Ray's first 2, Ani DiFranco